You Can’t Believe What You See

As if it weren’t hard enough to believe what we see in the post-Photoshop era, a Russian company, ElcomSoft, has figured out a way to crack the Canon Origina Data Security Kit software, and use it to “vet” altered photographs as being “unretouched.”

Canon developed this software as a way to verify the originality of an image and to confirm that global positioning coordinates, data, time, and other metadata hasn’t been changed.

The company posted photos, like the one above showing a cosmonaut on the moon, that had been verified by the Canon system as unretouched.

Carumba!

And you thought HDR was fooling around with reality. We’re through the looking glass (again) here.

“The entire image verification system is proved useless,” ElcomSoft CEO Vladimir Katalov said in a statement. “If one company was able to produce fake images indistinguishable from originals, how do we know that others haven’t been doing this for years?”

Here’s another “authenticated” photo. I wonder if “Uncle Joe” Stalin was able to get a stronger signal from his iPhone using the Gulag app?

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